Jessica Austin
AP English 3
Salyers 2
2.20.13
Aquatic HumanoidsFor generations, the human race has been fascinated with aquatic humanoids, a more common term being mermaids. Our ancestors have written literature, drawn pictures and sculpted statues of half-human, half-fish women.

Personally, I believe these sea creatures could be non-fiction due to the fact that the world has explored less than five percent of our oceans; one cannot simply determine a specimen does not exist without proof and vice versa. Scientists are still finding new sea creature species. For example, some recent discoveries are the golden copepod and the neocyema.

As homo sapiens, our bodies are not built to survive under water, therefore making it extremely difficult to investigate the earth’s oceans and seas. As air-breathers, we are exceedingly uneducated when it comes to who or what lives under the sea.

The common person believes that the mermaid or aquatic humanoid is a mythical creature imagined and made up for story books and fairy tales. There are plenty of odd creatures we have discovered in the oceans, so why do people think so ridiculously of seamen believing they’ve seen a mermaid? Stranger things have happened; stranger creatures have been spotted and recognized as a new species, like the blobfish, loch ness monster, and the axolotl, yet the half-human, half-fish specimen are still believed to be mythical and are refused to be accepted into society as real.

Society continues to believe that there is no chance in the creatures being real. But not only are they recognized by early Australians as “yawkyawks”, but also by people of the Stone Age. The Stone Age people drew them on walls, the same way they recorded what we believe is their history.

No “real evidence” has been found indicating the existence of aquatic humanoids, but during the whale beachings of South Africa, SONAR equipment recorded an unusual noise heard before in a SONAR recording in the previous...

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vi Brief Contents
Detailed Contents
Preface xxvii
Acknowledgments xxxviii
Part One Overview of Argument 1
1 Argument: An Introduction 2
What Do We Mean by Argument? 2
Argument Is Not a Fight or a Quarrel 2
Argument Is Not Pro-Con Debate 3
Arguments Can Be Explicit or Implicit 3
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The Defining Features of Argument 10
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Argument and the Problem of Truth 15
A Successful Process of Argumentation: The Well-Functioning
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...

...A mermaid is a legendary aquatic creature with the upper body of a female human and the tail of a fish.[1] Mermaids appear in the folklore of many cultures worldwide, including the Near East, Europe, Africa and Asia. The first stories appeared in ancient Assyria, in which the goddess Atargatis transformed herself into a mermaid out of shame for accidentally killing her human lover. Mermaids are sometimes associated with perilous events such as floods, storms, shipwrecks and drownings. In other folk traditions (or sometimes within the same tradition), they can be benevolent or beneficent, bestowing boons or falling in love with humans.
Mermaids are associated with the mythological Greek sirens as well as with sirenia, a biological order comprising dugongs and manatees. Some of the historical sightings by sailors may have been misunderstood encounters with these aquatic mammals. Christopher Columbus reported seeing mermaids while exploring the Caribbean, and sightings have been reported in the 20th and 21st centuries in Canada, Israel and Zimbabwe. The U.S. National Ocean Service stated in 2012 that no evidence of mermaids has ever been found.
Mermaids have been a popular subject of art and literature in recent centuries, such as in Hans Christian Andersen's well-known fairy tale "The...

...the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, and UFO’s have been passed down and followed by media. Mermaid stories seems to carry unignorable evidence relating towards the human existence.. Growing up, mermaids had been depicted in Disney cartoons; beautiful creatures with long luscious hair, and irresistible charm. Many people have always had a special knack for believing in aliens, ghosts, and mythical creatures, the things that are unexplainable to thehuman eye. Mermaid stories have a different approach to all the fairy tales, the mermaid comes along with real concrete evidence that could explain its possible existence. First off it is believed that the mermaid is a relative of the humans and branched off to live in the shadows of the sea. Second, the mermaid is a popular subject among many cultures throughout history. Lastly, the ocean is far big enough to hide any sort of species it doesn’t want us to find. Mermaids are real, and stem from human existence.
There is a theory among scientists known as the aquatic ape theory. It claims that humans went through an aquatic phase, living in the ocean, during evolution. The idea of mermaids is an extension of this theory, thinking that when returning to land some evolving humans were left behind, creating the...

...﻿Are we more human than humanoid robots?
In 1812, Mary Shelley wrote “Frankenstein”. She might not know that that she had directed the “Frankenstein Complex”, characterized by Isaac Asimov as the fear of human kind that one day, artificial beings will take away their future. To counter this complex, in “I, Robot”, Asimov presents to us that humans and robots are not so different and humans should work side-by-side with robots to create better lives. As processor and successor to Asimov, Karel Capek with “Rossum’s Universal Robots” (R.U.R) and Philip K. Dick with “Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep?” also blur the boundary between two groups, as robots themselves express humanlike qualities: some hope for independence and freedom, some are able to reason, some display the abilities to feel emotions such as love, anger, fear, friendship and empathy. Both Capek and Dick point out that at some points, robots are more human than we are, therefore support the claim in Asimov’s work that instead of killer robots, we should instead afraid of our self-dehumanization.
Asimov sees the Frankenstein complex as a challenge, a boundary human have to surpass to head to better future. Through “I, Robot”, Asimov describes the liveliness of robots to invoke an alternative feeling toward them instead of popular notion of killer robot. Robbie likes Cinderella story, Cutie can reason, Nestor...

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11/05/13
Mermaids
Have you ever wondered, why are there cave paintings and stories about beings that resemble a lot to humans but have tails like the ones of fish instead of feet, and live in the ocean. A discussion of this topic may lead to questions about the possibility of what we think to be a myth, might be real. It also may lead to questions because it might make us realize we are not the only creatures that do not act only by instinct, but also by reason which make it controversial. Why do dolphins like to play with us and obey us? My answer is simple, mermaids exist.
I know many people may disagree with this, or others will try to deny it because of the simple fact that we are unique, therefore no other creature can resemble to us and create handmade weapons or have a more complex language than any other animal of the sea. There is scientific evidence that can support the theory that states that mermaids do exist. The United States government forbade the reproduction of this video and in Colombia it was only presented once. Nevertheless, it is on YouTube. The documentary showed a group of scientists that were in charge of the investigation of whale strandings. These scientists also discovered sounds that came from the sea during the use of sonars. Experiments with these sonars are forbidden because it can damage internal organs of animals and cause strandings. The sounds of these creatures was...

...central aim was the creation of a new man- or at least the liberation of pristine man, in all his natural goodness and simplicity, from the cruel and corrupting prison of the traditionalsocial order. It is easy to see how this grandiose vision of the Revolution's purpose went hand-in-handwith the emergence of Romanticism. The great Romantic poets and philosophers encouraged people through-
46
1789
out the West to believe that imagination could triumph over custom and tradition, that everything was possible given the will to achieve it. In the early 1790s, the young William Wordsworth expressed the common enthusiasm for the seemingly brave and limitless new world of the Revolution: France standingon the top of golden hours, And human nature seeming born again. Here we encounter one of the many differences between reality and myth. The reality of the French Revolution, as Tocqueville maintained, was prepared by the rationalist philosophers of the 18th-century Enlightenment, by Voltaire, Diderot, Helvétius, d'Alembert, and Holbach no less than by Rousseau. Its myth, however, was perpetuated during the 19th century by Ro-
mantic poets such as Byron, Victor Hugo and Hôlderlin. Byron in his life and in his poetry bore witness to that romanticized revolutionary idealism, fighting and then dying as he did to help the Greeks throw off the Turkish yoke and set up a free state of their own. The grandeur of its lofty aims made the French Revolution all the...

...Mermaids
Today mermaids are one of the popular figures in the world. People think a mermaid is a young beautiful girl combing her long hair sitting on a rock, and being nice to the other creatures in the water, but honestly there nothing close to that. These creatures are similar to the Loch Ness monster and the Yeti. Some believe they kind many fake mermaids, usually made of the upper torso of a monkey and the tail of a salmon, which have been shown in fairs and circuses. In the age or trading and exploring, seeing a mermaid was almost like traveling to new worlds. Christopher Columbus saw three off Haiti, Sir Richard Whitburne sighted one when discovering Newfoundland in 1610, and Henry Hudson's crew saw a mermaid off Nova Zembla in 1625.
Where do the myths of mermaids come from? Somewhere in the later Middle Ages, the fish-woman mermaid supplanted the bird-woman siren as the creature believed to bring sailors out of the correct path, although in many languages words based on ‘siren’ continued to be used for the fish-woman. The shift to fish-women as the danger facing mariners may be related to an increasing ability to travel to the open sea, where mermaids live, out of sight of the coastal rocks where sirens had been thought to perch. Both sirens and mermaids have musical talents; bird-sirens sing and play the pipes and the lyre,...